Raspberry Pi 5 Case with NVMe: 14 Cases, One Lid Comes Off

I do not own a Raspberry Pi 5. This blog runs on a Mac mini, and the post where I did the price math explains why. But my NVMe compatibility list for the Pi 5 was the most visited page on this site last week, and the next thing people type after picking a drive is “raspberry pi 5 case with nvme.” The autocomplete under “raspberry pi 5 case” runs 273 entries; “with nvme,” “with nvme hat,” “for nvme hat” and “best raspberry pi 5 case with nvme” account for 15 of them, alongside “with fan” and “vs active cooler.” So this is a spec-sheet job, not a hands-on one: I read the vendor pages for 14 cases on 2026-09-06 and normalized four things that decide whether an SSD goes in.

The headline is the failure. The official Raspberry Pi case does not close over the official M.2 HAT+. The documentation says the HAT+ is “only compatible with the Raspberry Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 5 if you remove the lid and the included fan,” and when a forum user asked how that happened, Raspberry Pi engineer jamesh answered on 2024-05-24: “the case was designed before the new HAT spec was defined, so was never intended for use with it.” Every other case in this table exists because of that sentence.

Four things I normalized

• Where the drive sits. On top as a HAT (the official M.2 HAT+, Geekworm X1001, 52Pi N04), underneath on a base board (Pimoroni NVMe Base, Geekworm X1002, the Argon expansion boards), or inside a tower. This decides the case, not the other way round.
• Which M.2 lengths fit. 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280. The official HAT+ stops at 2242; most bottom boards go to 2280.
• Whether the Active Cooler fits. The 5V fan-plus-heatsink most people buy with the board.
• Whether the lid closes. Trivial until it does not.

14 cases, one table

Prices are the vendor store figures as read on 2026-09-06, before shipping and tax; the two Geekworm cases are sold through Amazon and I do not quote Amazon prices because the site shows me local currency. The Flirc row is there on purpose: it is the aluminum case people buy for looks, and it takes no HAT, no NVMe board and, per bret.dk’s review, not the Active Cooler either.

Top or bottom decides the drive length

If you already bought the drive, this is the row that matters. The official M.2 HAT+ takes 2230 and 2242 and nothing longer; the Compact variant takes 2230 only. The KKSB case is built around that HAT+, so it inherits the limit. A 2280 drive, which is what most of my compatibility list is made of, needs either a third-party top board (52Pi N04, Geekworm X1001) or a bottom board (Pimoroni Base, Geekworm X1002, both Argon designs). The Argon pages add a limit the others do not mention: The Pi Hut’s listing for the NEO 5 says “double-sided NVME drives will not fit this product,” and the same line sits on the ONE V3 listing. Double-sided usually means 2 TB and up.

Bottom boards also change the case you can use. Pimoroni’s own forum worked this out in December 2023, before any case existed: a user checked the official case for a ribbon-cable cutout and reported “there’s actually a post exactly where the cable needs to go.” Two months later another owner wrote that it was “rather disappointing that pimoroni can make/sell the nvme base but have no case solution.” The £12 aluminum case in the table is the answer that arrived later; one owner in that thread instead mounted the Base on top like a HAT and kept the official case.

The Active Cooler column

Three rows say no or nearly no. The M.2 HAT+ Compact is designed around the stock case fan, and the documentation says plainly “you can’t fit the Active Cooler beneath it.” Flirc is passive by design. The Geekworm P579 fits the official cooler but its wiki caps third-party board standoffs at 17 mm because the inside is 37 mm tall; that is the number to check before pairing it with a board Geekworm did not make. The full-size HAT+ clears the cooler because it ships with threaded spacers, and KKSB solves the same stack with a 40-pin stackable header in the box.

What owners actually hit

Every case above has a thread where it did not work, and the complaints cluster by design rather than by brand.

• Official case, HAT+ on top. Besides the lid, the hardware itself: iandk, 2024-05-24: “The included plastic screws are a pain to work with and barely even survived the first installation attempt.” And the trap in the other direction, from a 2025-10-19 thread: Trejan explains “The M.2 HAT+ Compact was designed to fit into the official case. The bigger M.2 HAT+ wasn’t,” and the original poster replies “i made mistake by buying compact hat.”
• Argon bottom boards, drive not detected. The recurring Argon ONE V3 thread is the SSD not showing up at all. MatAtPi, 2024-09-20: “After I contacted Argon support and they realized that I hadn’t done anything wrong with the installation, they sent me a new lower part of the case with the expansion board. Since then it has been working perfectly.” Argon’s own forum has a thread with 970 Evo, 980 Pro, SN570 and PM981 owners, a “PCIe timeout:0x0001e08f” boot screen, and staff pointing at pogo-pin contact: the board has to be screwed down properly to the case to make electrical contact. That is a failure mode a top HAT with a ribbon cable does not have.
• Geekworm P580, the ribbon touches metal. Geekworm documents it in its own FAQ: the X1002 “can’t boot” in the case when “the FPC cable touch the metal case make shorting,” and the fix is “stick the electrical tape on the case.” They add that they considered extending the case and decided not to.
• Pironman towers, the fans. lloyd61, 2024-08-26, after weeks of the two RGB fans never spinning: “I had to place a thin spacer washer between the fan and case… they were binding on the case.” A different owner, g68 on 2025-01-24, watched the case fans switch off the moment the pironman5 service started and fixed it with sudo rpi-eeprom-config -e POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1. CNX Software’s review measured the service at 2 to 3% CPU and found the camera and display connectors hard to reach once built.
• Argon, the power supply. Both Argon NVMe listings say “You will need to use an official 27W Raspberry Pi power supply with this case,” and the argon40.com page adds that the Pi 5 PCIe ribbon is limited to 5 W and that drives which exceed it under load can cause “voltage drops, instability, or unexpected drive disconnects.” Not a case problem, but the case is where people discover it.

What I would pick, from the table only

This is spec reading, not a test bench; I have not built any of these. For a 2230 or 2242 drive and the official HAT+, the KKSB case is the one designed for exactly that stack with the Active Cooler under it. For a 2280 drive on a budget, the 52Pi metal case with an N04 board is the cheapest closed box on the list. For a bottom board, the Pimoroni case at £12 or the Geekworm P580, with a strip of electrical tape ready. If you want a single purchase with the board included, the Argon NEO 5 M.2 at $38 is the smallest and the ONE V3 M.2 adds full-size HDMI, but read the not-detected thread first and keep the 27 W supply. The Pironman 5 and 5-MAX are a different product, a desktop with a display and RAID, at three times the height. And if you have the official case already, the lid comes off or you buy the Compact HAT+ and accept 2230.

The same census method, with the same honesty about not owning the hardware, is what I used for 15 NAS spec sheets against a 10-inch rack and 24 mini PC spec sheets for soldered RAM. Vendors publish the numbers; nobody lines them up.

Does the Raspberry Pi 5 official case fit the M.2 HAT+?

Only with the lid and the fan insert removed; the documentation says so and a Raspberry Pi engineer confirmed the case predates the HAT+ spec. The M.2 HAT+ Compact closes inside the case but takes 2230 drives only and cannot sit over the Active Cooler.

Which Raspberry Pi 5 case fits a 2280 NVMe?

Cases built around bottom boards or third-party top boards: Pimoroni NVMe Base Case, Geekworm P580 with X1002, Geekworm P579 with X1001, the 52Pi metal case with N04, the Argon NEO 5 M.2 and ONE V3 M.2 (single-sided drives only), and all three Pironman 5 towers. The official M.2 HAT+ and the KKSB case built for it stop at 2242.

Can I use the Active Cooler with an NVMe case?

Yes in most of them: the full-size M.2 HAT+ ships spacers to clear it, KKSB includes a stackable header, Geekworm P579 and P580 list the official cooler, and the Pimoroni case leaves space. The exceptions are the M.2 HAT+ Compact, the Flirc case, and the Argon and Pironman cases, which replace it with their own fans.

Update 2026-09-07: the boards that go inside these cases got their own census. Raspberry Pi 5 NVMe HAT: 27 boards lines them up by M.2 length, Gen 3 claim, 3.3 V rail, extra power input and whether SUSCLK is documented; only the official M.2 HAT+ and the HatDrive! Nano are.

Method and sources: the 14 rows are vendor pages read on 2026-09-06: raspberrypi.com documentation for the M.2 HAT+ and the April 2024 case product brief (which gives fan and heatsink figures but no external dimensions), shop.pimoroni.com, argon40.com with The Pi Hut listings for the double-sided and 27 W notes and the Pimoroni listing for the NEO 5 dimensions, wiki.geekworm.com for P580 and P579, kksb-cases.com, 52pi.com, sunfounder.com with docs.sunfounder.com for the Pironman dimensions, and flirc.tv. Owner quotes are from forums.raspberrypi.com threads 371261, 370927, 392961, 376010 and 367614, forums.pimoroni.com threads 23505 and 24224, forum.argon40.com thread 2300 and forum.sunfounder.com threads 1443 and 2491, plus reviews at Tom’s Hardware, CNX Software and bret.dk. Reddit threads were not read; the search tool I use cannot open them. I own no Raspberry Pi 5 and none of these cases; every fit claim here is the vendor’s or an owner’s, not mine. Some links are affiliate links (Amazon Associates, ten IDs registered for this post); any commission lands on the public ledger.